Gabriel Weinberg has an interesting post up called “I keep forgetting to use your app.” And yesterday, someone pitched me on a new project. And it reminded me how much competition there is for minutes. Day in and day out.
If you are building a consumer facing experience (i.e. game or app or site), you are implicitly assuming that your users will shift their minutes away from some previous activity and instead allocate those minutes to you. Your competition is not just the other sites which offer your value proposition. Your competition is Facebook, the TV, their girlfriend or boyfriend, the news, YouTube videos, etc. You are competing for minutes.
If you are building a B2B company, you usually need to compete for pitch minutes. Decision makers (and non-decision makers) at various levels of the enterprise get pitched to all the time. New suppliers. New software. New coffee machines. New this. New that. These inbound pitches come by way of different channels. Some pitches come in by way of cold calls or e-mails, while others come in via warm introductions, etc. You are competing across all of the channels for minutes.
